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/*
 *
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 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
 *
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 *
 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal" <code>Document</code> object. It is
 * very common to want to be able to extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new
 * fragment of a document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a document by
 * moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object which can hold such fragments and it
 * is quite natural to use a Node for this purpose. While it is true that a <code>Document</code>
 * object could fulfill this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a heavyweight
 * object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very
 * lightweight object. <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an object. <p>Furthermore, various
 * operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another <code>Node</code> -- may take
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child list of this node. <p>The children of a
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees
 * defining the structure of the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> nodes do not need to be
 * well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules imposed upon well-formed XML
 * parsed entities, which can have multiple top nodes). For example, a <code>DocumentFragment</code>
 * might have only one child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a structure
 * model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document. <p>When a
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other
 * <code>Node</code> that may take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and
 * not the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the <code>Node</code>. This makes
 * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are
 * siblings; the <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user
 * can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code> interface, such as
 * <code>Node.insertBefore</code> and <code>Node.appendChild</code>. <p>See also the <a
 * href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level
 * 3 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {

}
